Background

Compliance with standards and best practice guidelines involves the creation and use of descriptive metadata. Recordkeeping metadata is used to identify, authenticate, and contextualise records, as well as the people, processes and systems involved in their creation, management and use. Structured context-rich information about business processes, agents, systems and information resources is a vital tool in managing business transactions and related information objects in complex intranet/internet environments to support eBusiness and eGovernment.

In the last 5 years, a suite of standards, best practice models and guidelines has been developed to address the challenge of managing electronic records and other information objects. The main objectives have been to support reliable, trustworthy and accountable business processes, and to provide better access to information resources online, particularly in the areas of eGovernment and eBusiness.

All of the industry partners involved in this project have contributed to the development of the suite of standards, best practice models and guidelines now in place in most jurisdictions in Australia. The conceptual framework for the development of Australian records management and recordkeeping metadata standards has been provided by the records continuum theory developed by the Records Continuum Research Group, and the Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema.

Recordkeeping metadata standards developers envisaged that standards would be implemented in integrated systems environments that enable the clever use of metadata. However in practice there are significant implementation problems, as current systems environments do not as yet support the integrated processes for sharing metadata and re-using it for multiple purposes anticipated by the standards developments. Moreover the development of metatools for the automatic creation of metadata and the translation of metadata values (for example metadata schema registries and conceptual mapping tools) has not kept pace with the theoretical advances and standards development. This project will address these problems by developing a proof of concept prototype to demonstrate how standards-compliant metadata can be created once in particular application environments then used many times for multiple purposes across business applications and in different environments. The prototype will be implemented in a test-bed site to provide a model for best practice. Development of the prototype and its implementation model will also require the prototyping of model metatools, including a mini metadata registry.

This project has a close relationship with a major international initiative, InterPARES, the International Project on the Preservation of Authentic Records in Electronic Systems, 1999-2006 (funded by the Canadian Social Science and History Research Council, SSHRC, Can$4m). In 2002-2006, InterPARES aims at developing a theoretical understanding of the records generated by interactive, dynamic, and experiential systems, their processes of creation, and their present and potential use in the artistic, scientific and government sectors.

The Research Problem

Clever Recordkeeping Metadata Home

 

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Authorised by Head, School of Information Management and Systems. Caution.
Maintained by Records Continuum Research Group.

Last updated 12 October 2003.